TV Cameras Enter the Jury Room--What’s the Verdict?

If you oppose television cameras in the courtroom, get a load of this.

“Not just cameras in the courtroom, but cameras with the jurors as they deliberate,” correspondent Ed Bradley announces tonight to begin a two-hour CBS News documentary that eavesdrops on deliberations that decide the outcomes of three criminal cases in Phoenix.

“Enter the Jury Room” is distinctive. You actually witness excerpts of jurors hashing over each case (“I feel he acted strictly in self-defense”) and then reaching a verdict, all on videotape. “A historic glimpse,” CBS calls it. Not that historic, actually, for the PBS series “Frontline” glimpsed the same process in a 1986 documentary titled “Inside the Jury Room.”

If only a TV camera also had been the public’s fly on the wall ogling jurors in the controversial trials of O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers and the LAPD officers who clobbered Rodney King. Those verdicts would have been demystified, aborting wild speculation and confusion.

On the other hand, at what cost?

Cameras in California courtrooms took a monster hit from the televised Simpson criminal trial, with Court TV’s pool coverage being unjustly found guilty by some of promoting the shrieking media din and other high jinks that haunted the case, and TV later being banned from Simpson’s civil trial. Live coverage has been a fixture in California courts since 1980. Yet there’s no question that California judges, bucking a trend in most other states, are now much less inclined than before to allow live TV inside their courtrooms.

Too bad. Both the public and the judicial system have much more to gain from having trials televised than from excluding electronic coverage.

Yet if there is a case to be made against unobtrusive cameras as observers in relatively large courtrooms--on the basis that they may influence the behavior of trial participants who either perform for the lens or are unnerved by it--then what about the impact on the more intimate discussions of jurors? That concern applies even when, as in the case of CBS, only remote-controlled cameras are used and network personnel are excluded from the jury room.

If the Arizona judicial system is in any way abused by “Enter the Jury Room,” it has only itself to blame. Tonight’s program would not have been possible had not CBS first gained approval of the defendants, attorneys on both sides, the jurors and the Arizona Supreme Court.

“We are intruding into the sanctity of the jury room,” Chief Justice Stanley Feldman acknowledges to CBS tonight. But he adds: “I thought to myself, ‘If you think this is such a good system, and such a good system for the people of the United States, well, the people of the United States ought to have a look at it and judge for themselves.’ ”

*

Just what they’ll learn is not clear. Although some juries have been known to be stormy, deliberations shown tonight are a model of civility, with no bullying, aggression or ganging up on holdouts.

Not that viewers can perceive from these fleeting jury room excerpts, however, the entirety of what transpired during deliberations. Are tonight’s jurors behaving abnormally? Although some of them maintain tonight in interviews afterward that they took no notice of the cameras while discussing their cases--and indeed appear to behave naturally--there’s no way to know if that’s true. Or whether the presence of TV had even a subtle influence on the decisions they reached.

In any case, the potential for judicial harm from TV in the jury room cannot be discounted.

“It’s a risk, and I’d be troubled if this was a regular occurrence,” Valerie Hans, a jury researcher and University of Delaware professor who delivers some sound bites in the CBS program, said by phone from her home Monday. “But I think as an occasional matter, well, there’s some educating to be done. I’ve been studying juries since 1973. You have simulation studies, but you always have a sense you don’t know what’s going on inside. We’ve never been able to go inside the jury room, but CBS has done that for us.”

Reported by Bradley and Richard Schlesinger, “Enter the Jury Room” interviews participating attorneys and judges in addition to Hans and jurors. It also shows a bit of each trial’s jury selection process and courtroom testimony, juxtaposing some of the latter with deliberations to illustrate points made by the separate panels of eight jurors (the number that CBS says is assigned to Arizona cases when the potential sentence is 30 years or less).

Two of the three cases monitored tonight result in hung juries and second trials. CBS returns for one of the additional proceedings and, in the other, merely informs viewers of the new trial’s outcome.

*

If near-empty courtrooms are an indication, none of the cases was spectacular or highly publicized. In the first, Arturo Lopez, 19, is accused of using a gun to rob a mini-mart of some beer in 1995. But no firearm was found, so his public-defender attorneys claim he is guilty only of shoplifting. Seen as pivotal are the clerk’s testimony against Lopez and a recording of a 911 call made just after the incident.

The deliberations are completed in three hours. Only one juror initially votes against conviction. “I think that he could have had a gun, but I’m not convinced,” she says. The most revealing moment comes not inside the jury room, however, but when the prosecutor is unable to define “reasonable doubt” for Schlesinger.

A phone call is also crucial in the second case, in which young mother Modesto Solano, also represented by public defenders, is accused of arriving at the Phoenix airport with a large quantity of drugs in 1995. She claims she was unaware of the drugs, that they were in the possession of her companion. But he has made a deal with prosecutors to testify against her in exchange for a lighter sentence.

The initial vote is 6-2 for conviction. One holdout ignores the judge’s instructions to not consider the great disparity in potential jail time for the woman and her companion. Another holdout appears to change his mind, then returns to his original position.

The most interesting of the cases, touching on the issue of vigilantism, is No. 3, in which Troy York is charged with aggravated assault in the 1993 shotgun wounding of a man sitting in a car. York’s story: Hearing a noise outside his home, he grabbed his shotgun and went outside, where he fatally shot a fleeing man who had stopped to point an assault rifle at him. York then found the dead man’s companion waiting in a car and, expecting him to be armed, shot him, too.

He was indicted not for the fatal shooting, but only for wounding the second man, who, as it turned out, was unarmed. Jurors initially vote 5-3 to convict York. “I agree that he was in danger,” says one juror, “but I think that he caused it.” Another juror insists that York acted in self-defense.

And so goes tonight’s lesson. As voyeuristic TV, “Enter the Jury Room” is moderately dramatic. As a peephole on the judicial process, it’s at least as perilous as it is educational.

* “Enter the Jury Room” airs 9-11 tonight on CBS (Channel 2).